Coal dust was in their veins
My uncle was an underground miner who worked for decades in Crowsnest Pass coal mines. He was a tough, stocky man, accustomed to hard work and an unforgiving life. As he was dying in the Pincher Creek hospital, a nurse tried to wash his hands, blackened by a lifetime of exposure to coal dust. He endured the scrubbing for a while and finally bluntly told the nurse “the coal’s not on me, it’s in me”. Indeed, coal dust was imbedded in his skin.
One might speculate what my uncle’s lungs resembled, if his hands were so impregnated with coal dust. His other health issues were not as evident but were a legacy of coal mining.
My uncle took mining jobs at Drumheller and later the Crowsnest Pass. I doubt if he would have called himself prosperous, other than owning a small miner’s cottage and later in life, the occasional new car, polished and immaculately maintained.
My aunt and her family emigrated from northern Italy, to work in coal mines on the BC side of the Crowsnest Pass. Despite the multiple booms and busts, minimal safety standards and being unable to hang her laundry outside except for Sundays for the coal dust, she remained fatalistically optimistic about new mine openings.
Without alternatives my uncle and aunt were trapped in the spiral of unsustainable and ephemeral promises of coal. They breathed coal, literally and figuratively — they were perhaps unable to assess the reality of their situation and envision another future.
My uncle was an angler and a hunter, both pursuits that tune ones’ observational powers. If my uncle and others were concerned about the changes to the landscape, the eroding coal spoil piles, the dust, despoiled rivers and streams, they said nothing.
I can’t fault my uncle’s silence. As Upton Sinclair observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Coal mining has costs and they occur at multiple levels. We can’t, or shouldn’t, remain blind to this reality. When we get beyond the boosterism and hype to do a proper accounting it becomes clear the costs outweigh the benefits.
Repeatedly, taxpayers bear the costs, especially the ecological ones, and corporations escape with the benefits while a dumbfounded set of politicians won’t admit to being suckered.
Ironically, it is the mine workers who also end up cheated, led on by the boosters, lured into jobs that may not last and often suffering health related illnesses that could rob them of a long life.
Maybe my uncle didn’t sense he had a choice. We do, and it doesn’t involve digging huge holes in the Eastern Slopes.
My uncle’s silence on the costs and inevitability of coal mining fortunately doesn’t have to pass to us. That was then. In light of history and better information we can be smart enough to not get sucked into a vortex of economic hype, unrealistic promises and destroyed landscapes.
We need to pause, and ask our politicians to pause and consider carefully the costs and consequences of trying to resurrect a coal mining economy which liquidates one asset at the expense of so many others. This is not an issue to be complacent about.
Recent evaluations of three BC metallurgical coal mines found the company’s rosy projections for jobs, royalty payments and economic benefits were vastly overstated. Given these circumstances, why the Alberta government is promoting new coal mine development is a mystery.
A long legacy of environmental failures in all phases of coal development— exploration, mining and reclamation— especially in mountain and foothill landscapes should make even the most optimistic of us question if it is ever technically feasible to mine coal and protect other values.
It would be instructive and should be mandatory, for our government to conduct a comprehensive survey of all mines in Alberta to capture what was said in initial impact assessments, versus what actually happened, as a guide for future decisions on coal development.
The bright light of truth would be a good antidote to the impulse to fall, once more, for a new litany of unrealistic and empty promises.
It appears the UCP government has coal clogging their veins and brains. If we are to proceed with the fantasy of coal as our economic salvation, all coal development proposals should be vetted through joint federal/provincial hearings as an essential curb on current political short-sightedness and economic myopia.
As citizens with a social and ecological conscience we would do well to express, forcefully, to politicians seemingly in the pocket of foreign companies a singular truth— we’ve seen enough now to know that our economic salvation doesn’t lie with blasting the tops off mountains, burying valleys (and native trout) in overburden, turning our drinking water toxic and contributing to the same human health issues that killed my uncle. For such truth is, now so clearly, self-evident.
Lorne Fitch is a Professional Biologist, a retired provincial Fish and Wildlife Biologist and a former Adjunct professor with the University of Calgary.